THROUGHOUT this year, witnessing the Economy Minister appearing before the Senedd to announce job losses has become a worryingly frequent occurrence. With increasing regularity, he expresses his remorse and condolences, offering warm words and sympathies — but these are no substitute for concrete solutions.
In 2023 alone, we have seen employer after employer close their doors or speak of jobs at risk: more than 700 jobs lost on Ynys Mon after 2 Sisters Food Group announced it would be closing its poultry plant; Avara Foods in Abergavenny, 400 job losses; Tillery Valley Foods in Blaenau Gwent, 250 jobs lost; Zimmer Biomet in my home county of Bridgend, 540 jobs currently at risk, as are 500 in UK Windows and Doors in the Rhondda. A reported figure of approximately 3,000 at-risk jobs in Tata’s steelworks in Port Talbot still looms.
Time after time, we’re told that the administrators are in control of the situation, and how they seek to gain value is something out of the hands of the Welsh government. This is a position which leaves workers, the value creators in our society, without any long-term clarity.
How, then, do we go about delivering that clarity, ensuring that long-term strategic intent is translated into meaningful action? One answer, I believe, lies in the rapid expansion of Wales’s co-operative and employee-owned sector.
Previous Welsh government economic policy — heavily reliant on attracting inward and foreign direct investment — has meant that mobile and often extractive capital has increasing influence over the Welsh economy. All too often, this has resulted in beauty pageants and auctions for foreign direct investment.
Placelessness, as we see it today, is problematic. Firms participating in this practice engage with a place only partially, often to exploit a particular resource in ways that have deep repercussions for the communities in which it occurs.
However, the benefits of co-operatives and co-operatised models of ownership offer a very real alternative to corporate buyouts and the lack of rootedness that so often features in the Welsh economy. These benefits are well-documented and directly address some of the most pressing challenges confronting Wales.
These challenges encompass the prominence of geographically mobile and extractive capital, lagging productivity and poor resilience levels in the business base, the out-migration of young people and the failure to attract them back, as well as the climate emergency.
This much is acknowledged by the Welsh government, which is poised to comfortably meet its manifesto pledge of increasing the number of employee-owned businesses in Wales from 37 to 74 by May 2026.
However, within the wider context of Wales’s economy, employee ownership remains limited, almost niche. Indeed, this claim is bolstered by the recent Co-operatives UK report on the co-operative and mutual economy in 2023. This shows that, despite enjoying among the fastest growth in the UK in terms of the number of co-operative businesses, annual turnover is the lowest of the UK nations at £0.5 billion — just 0.6 per cent of Welsh gross domestic product.
This is damning. The absence of any marked increase in turnover or narrowing of the productivity gap, despite the growing number of co-operative enterprises in Wales, is perhaps indicative of a lack of attention paid to the character of these businesses, the support being afforded to them, and, ultimately, a lack of appreciation for the potentially transformative impact that co-operative models could contribute.
The capacity for these models to inform a broader strategy of community wealth building, to wrest control back into communities in systems such as finance, energy, housing and care, is cause for genuine hope, even if that potential is, as of yet, largely unrealised.
How do we realise this potential? Co-operatives, social enterprises, community- and employee-owned businesses must be an integral part of a wider objective to re-orient the Welsh economy to serve people, not the other way around. These models should be proactively promoted and viewed as the default, go-to position rather than the quirky exception.
The resource currently allocated to fostering these models is wholly misaligned with the rhetorical pomp and ambition that the Welsh government says it has, betraying a lack of serious regard for the role these might play in rebalancing power in our communities.
The vehicles are arguably already in place to drive the change. The Development Bank of Wales, adequately resourced to match the scale of ambition that we need to see, could be the means through which we see mass co-operatisation.
The current Programme for Government commitment is a drop in the ocean. Plaid Cymru recognises the massive opportunity and the necessity for a serious, transformative step change in approach, channelling what are currently disparate policy areas — from the foundational economy, net zero and the scant level of current government-enabled community wealth-building work, through to a renewed mission for the Development Bank of Wales to significantly ramp up support for co-operatisation — towards the singular goal of creating an economy, and a Wales, in service to people and communities, built on the values of radical co-operation and mutuality.
Luke Fletcher is MS for South Wales West and the Plaid Cymru economy spokesperson. Follow him on Twitter @FletcherPlaid.
